“I Like To Cast Someone Who Doesn’t Fit the Part”

Vibe is an upcoming Bollywood action-comedy spy thriller written, directed, and produced by Kunal Kemmu. After the critical acclaim for his directorial debut Madgaon Express, Kemmu returns pulling double duty — directing and playing the lead.

The story follows two ordinary, clueless best friends — Hardik (Kunal Kemmu) and Bugs (Sparsh Shrivastava of Laapataa Ladies fame) who can barely manage their daily lives until they accidentally stumble into a dangerous terrorist conspiracy. At the heart of Vibe is the friendship between Hardik and Bugs, making the casting central to the film’s dynamic. While Sparsh may not have been the obvious fit for Bugs as originally written, Kemmu saw an opportunity to do something unexpected.

Speaking about reshaping the character for Sparsh, Kunal said, “In all honesty, he doesn’t fit the part as is, so I moulded it a little bit because as an actor I know you can. I don’t believe when people say you cannot pull off something like this. If you’re a good actor, you can pull it off unless it’s not your age. If the director has one particular physicality in mind, or bohot action hai but isne kabhi action hi nahi kiya hai ya physically utna strong nahi hai, those aspects I get, which also actors can work on.” He added, “He was younger than the part, so I made the part younger and I made the relationship between them slightly different from how it was initially imagined. Only because I thought that he is an interesting actor and it was a different part from what he had done before. I like to do that with actors,” Kemmu continued. “When people always see them like yeh aisa kar raha hai, you always get cast for the same thing.”

In the teaser, Preity G Zinta as Madam H tells Kunal’s character, “Come on now, be a soldier,” and walks off — an improvised line that doubles as a cheeky nod to her iconic film Soldier. It wasn’t in the script at all. In fact, nobody on set even caught it in the moment! It was only in the edit that the team realised they had a perfect meta moment on their hands. Kunal Kemmu recalled: “That line wasn’t written, she improvised it. Her line was ‘mard bano,’ but while leaving she added, ‘be a soldier.’ I replied in flow, ‘Kaise soldier banunga, Bobby Deol hun kya main?’ No one noticed it on set. Later we saw it and said, ‘Yeh toh meta ho gaya, rakhte hain.’”